On a dreary October evening in Springdale Village Centre, in the northeast of Brampton, the energy inside Gurpreet Singh Dhillon’s campaign office was not what you’d expect from an embattled former councillor attempting to take back his seat. The room was animated: young volunteers sprawled across couches, and a small crowd of supporters chatted excitedly while others helped with campaign activities. At a table along the wall, a woman laid out hot chai and snacks.

It was the atmosphere of a confident campaign in full swing. Beyond the office walls, however, Dhillon’s return to the race in Brampton Wards 9 and 10 has been overshadowed by a controversy that has followed him the past four years.

From 2014 to 2022, Dhillon served as city councillor, and then regional councillor, for Wards 9 and 10 at the northeastern edge of Brampton (the city’s councillors, who are elected to either city council or regional council, represent two wards at a time). But in the final year of his tenure, Dhillon was subject to an Integrity Commissioner investigation, following allegations of sexual assault brought forward by a Brampton business owner after the two attended a 2019 City trade mission to Turkey. Dhillon has denied these allegations; they have not been proven in court, and no criminal charges were ever laid. (The Integrity Commissioner told Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown in a 2019 email that Peel Regional Police told her they were not investigating due to “jurisdictional issues.”)

At the time, the Integrity Commissioner concluded that Dhillon had breached several rules in the City’s “Code of Conduct for Members of Council,” including those regarding harassment, discreditable conduct, failure to adhere to council’s policies and procedures, and obstruction of her investigation. The then-incumbent councillor was suspended without pay for 90 days, and was asked to resign from his seat in a motion unanimously voted in by council. He refused; while he ran for a third term that same year, he lost by 227 votes to Gurpartap Singh Toor, the youngest regional councillor in Brampton’s history.

In the years since, reports have emerged that the complainant has withdrawn the allegation against Dhillon—but the City refused Dhillon’s request to remove the Integrity Commissioner’s report from its website. Now, against the backdrop of that contention and resulting legal battles, Dhillon is once again seeking re-election, a decision that’s garnered public scrutiny. And the incumbent, Toor, has chosen not to run for a second term, stepping away from politics to focus on his family.

Normally, a former councillor would have some advantage running for an open seat they’ve won twice before—but with the allegations against Dhillon and the lack of clarity around where they now stand, the crowded regional council race in Brampton’s Ward 9 and 10 could be anyone’s game.

From his vantage point as outgoing councillor for Wards 9 and 10, Toor says that while Dhillon is undoubtedly popular among some, his name “has become very synonymous” with the allegations.

The most common reaction Toor has seen regarding the candidate’s decision to run again has been surprise. “Once people make a decision of pushing somebody out of office, it’s very rare that people will try to bring the same person back into the same office again,” Toor says. “They had the choice to do that once, and they chose not to.”

Dhillon, for his part, says he is running again because residents have asked him to return after what he describes as a failure of leadership over the past four years. He points to years of property tax increases, allegations of fiscal mismanagement at city hall, and concerns that councillors are not sufficiently accessible to residents. He characterizes his campaign as offering a return to a stronger record of representation.

When asked about the allegations of sexual misconduct, Dhillon says, “We’ve cleared all that up.”

But the situation remains largely unresolved. In 2023, the complainant’s lawyer reportedly sent a letter to Brampton city council in which the complainant withdrew her allegations against Dhillon. Subsequently, Dhillon sought to have the Integrity Commissioner’s report about the allegations expunged from the city’s website. But the Integrity Commissioner said that power lies with city council, according to reporting from local publication The Pointer. The Integrity Commissioner then also told council she had been unable to authenticate that the withdrawal letter did, in fact, come from the complainant, and that she hadn’t been able to reach the complainant for over two years. (Reporting from 2020 also indicates that the Integrity Commissioner heard an audio recording of the alleged assault which the complainant took part way through the incident.)  The punitive report against Dhillon remains online.

Dhillon, and subsequent reporting by The Pointer, says the complainant’s lawyer has verified the authenticity of the letter.The Pointer said in early October that they were able to find the woman “in minutes,” and even verified her workplace (though it does not appear that they approached her to verify the contents of the letter, and reporting by the Brampton Guardian indicates the woman signed a nondisclosure agreement). The City did not respond to The Local’s multiple requests for comment.

The environment at city hall surrounding these allegations has been rife with tension and mudslinging. Dhillon characterizes the City as choosing “politics over truth.” According to The Pointer, Dhillon was known to be an opponent of Mayor Brown, and the sitting Integrity Commissioner was hired by Brown, prompting questions about the possibility of a conflict of interest. Dhillon says he has commenced legal action, seeking $1 for general damages, and $50,000 for aggravated damages, as well as the legal costs for the action.

Brown, in turn, has accused Dhillon of paying “hush money” to settle the case: in 2020, the complainant filed a $2.1-million dollar lawsuit against Dhillon and the City, which was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, according to reporting by the Brampton Guardian. City hall staff have refuted the claim that this settlement involved “hush money.”

Despite the ongoing disparities between the City’s account of events and his own, Dhillon believes residents know his character. “People respect me. They respect my family…They know I’m a family man,” he says. He describes the ward as needing someone who is available to serve the people at a moment’s notice. “People come with their problems, sit in my living room every day. We’ve never said no,” says Dhillon.

Dhillon is campaigning on a return to “proven leadership,” drawing heavily on his previous time on council, with public safety at the centre of his platform. One of his key priorities is expanding police presence in Brampton’s east end, building on his motion from 2021 for a satellite police station. “Our goal was to expand that into a full police division,” says Dhillon. He also calls for greater affordability, including a property tax freeze. “What I see is people struggling financially. The property tax burden is suffocating people.”

Ravi Sohal, a part-time real estate agent and IT worker who has lived in Ward 10 for the past nine years, says that looking at the landscape of candidates in his ward elicits “very mixed feelings.”

“There is not an effective leader [among] all these running candidates,” he says.

It’s not just Dhillon’s controversial past that Sohal finds off-putting. Like many other candidates, Dhillon is campaigning on a promise of freezing taxes, something beyond the power of any single councillor. Taxes have steadily gone up in Brampton every year between 2022 and 2025, though not this past year. “For two terms, they were in power, and they were not able to do anything,” says Sohal, referring to the sitting councillors who saw the rates rise under their mandate, and are now campaigning to freeze them. “Do you guys think that being elected as a regional councillor gives you the individual power that you can make that change?”

For Sohal, the promises raise a broader, age-old question about accountability: whether candidates like Dhillon are offering realistic solutions or making commitments that are beyond their individual control. In communities rich with newer immigrants who may not be as familiar with municipal politics, this campaign messaging can feel particularly troubling (immigrants make up roughly 60 percent of the populace, with a particularly large South Asian population spanning generations). He’d much rather see the candidates tackle construction on local streets and expand commercial zoning and employment opportunities—issues within the ward that residents want addressed by their elected officials.

The race to lead Brampton’s Wards 9 and 10 is shaping up, in some ways, as a contest between familiarity and change. Dhillon, with his mixed name recognition and history, is facing competitors who have spent months building their own campaigns and connections in the community.